Hi Hilko, On Sat, 2017 Mar 18 10:35+0100, Hilko Bengen wrote: > > This is intentional, see #847049. It turned out that the /usr/bin/mail > "interface" was not well-defined and having the alternative set to s- > nail broke scripts provided by other packages.
Wasn't heirloom-mailx (the predecessor of s-nail) the primary mailx provider for Debian? I don't understand why package scripts would have broken, when they would have been prototyped using h-m in the first place. In any event, h-m originally provided /usr/bin/mail and the upgrade path causes this to disappear. Scripts breaking due to mail(1) interface variations is a pain, but scripts breaking due to mail(1) disappearing altogether is a regression. > > Note that the package description for bsd-mailx indicates that this > > package (s-nail) provides /usr/bin/mail . > > That's not quite how I read the description. I'm open to suggestions > for improvements, though. When I read "/usr/bin/mail interface," that implies to me that there is a /usr/bin/mail executable. Was the description intended to mean something like "mailx-style interface?" > > Also, the s-nail package in Ubuntu Xenial (14.8.6-1 as of this > > writing) does Provide: mail-reader, mailx . > > I'd expect this to change by the time Ubuntu Z-whatever (17.04) is > released: Ubuntu's s-nail package is taken from Debian -- just before > I removed the "Provides:" header. Ah, understood. I thought they might have tweaked the package source. --Daniel
